Chess

Chess began as a war game. In the 6th century of the Gupta Empire, in the northwest of what is now India, a game called chaturanga — the four divisions of the army: infantry, cavalry, elephants, and chariots — was played on an 8-by-8 board. The pieces moved in stiff, limited ways. The king was the king. The infantry became the pawn. The cavalry became the knight. The elephant, in the long migration west, became the bishop — a piece whose original move, a diagonal leap of two squares, remembered the elephant's lumbering gait. The chariot became the rook.

The game traveled the Silk Road. By the 9th century it was in Persia, where the phrase shah mat — the king is helpless — entered the language. The Arab world took it up next; the first chess manuals and the first chess problems were written in Baghdad in the 9th and 10th centuries. The game reached Europe by the year 1000, carried by Moorish Spain and by traders returning from the Crusades. The Church tried to ban it — a bishop in 1061 called chess a distraction from prayer — and lost.

The modern game was born in the 15th century, in Europe, when the pieces suddenly began to move. The queen, once the weakest piece on the board, was given the long diagonal and the long straight line — a change so dramatic that the Spanish called the new game mad queen's chess. The bishop took its modern diagonal. The pawn was allowed to move two squares on its first turn, and to capture en passant. Castling was codified. The game we play today is the game of 1475, not of 600.

The 19th century organized it. The first international tournament was held in London in 1851; the first official world championship in 1886, when Wilhelm Steinitz beat Johannes Zukertort and declared himself world champion. Steinitz also invented the positional school — the idea that the pieces should be built up quietly, not merely attacked with. The 20th century gave chess its great rivalries: Capablanca the natural, Alekhine the calculator, the Cuban and the Russian dueling across the board. Then the Cold War made chess a proxy war. In 1972, in Reykjavik, the American Bobby Fischer took the world title from the Soviet Boris Spassky in a match that the front pages of both countries covered like a summit. In 1997, the IBM machine Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov, the last human world champion, and a new age began. For the empty nester, chess is the rare game that gets harder the more you learn — and the rarer one that rewards a lifetime of study with a lifetime of defeat.